Does anyone know how the natural overdrive sounds? I'm looking for an amp that doesn't need too many pedals. Obviously I'd be using an OD pedal some of the time, but I was wondering how dirty this thing gets on its own.

Does anyone know how the natural overdrive sounds? I'm looking for an amp that doesn't need too many pedals. Obviously I'd be using an OD pedal some of the time, but I was wondering how dirty this thing gets on its own.

There's no master volume, so the amp is only going to overdrive when it's cranked up loud. Once there, it's awesome. Really rich and throaty, thicker and deeper than most Fenders. A popular trick with the Bassman (and it's many clones) is to jump the channels. Plug into one, and run an instrument cable from the second input of that channel into an inputon the other channel. That gets both preamps involved, and dirties up the signal more aggressively. This is essentially the amp that Jim Marshall based his Plexi on.

But yeah, at lower volumes you're going to have to rely on a pedal for OD.

The AB165 bassman is generally thought of as the worst bassman fender made. It's kind of a hybrid of the silverface and blackface specs. It's a good amp but when stock it's distortion is very fizzy and the negative feedback loop kills your tone. You will need to rewire the biase pot and turn it from a balace pot into an adjustable fixed bias. You will also need to clip the tone sucking caps that run over the plate load resistors and you will need to remove the negative feedback and rewire it like a real blackface.

After you have done all this the amp is going to have quite a bit of hum because of the poor layout and it'll still sound fizzy due to the type of preamp circuit.

If you want to do the work to make it sound good then it can be a great amp. I love mine. But if you don't want to put in the work then this isn't the amp for you.